The Remote Island by Bryan Christian Today on Nerve's TV blog: Dance, Hipster, Dance! Plus: our latest NewsCrush — and why one army brat is breaking up with Army Wives.
The first time we stood or lay before each other or on each other, naked or partly so, which was also the first day we met, or, more precisely, the end of the first day, we couldn't know it was the beginning of something and the end of something else, not at that moment, we couldn't see what we were entering into, though we should have been able to — call it subterranean, call it a dream, call it shadowy, call it a mistake, call it inarticulate; in retrospect it was a room filled with all these mysteries, but we still should have been able to see where we were headed, and maybe we did — it had been a long day and in a few hours the sun would rise and we would go back to our lives. At the door to this room, when nothing was yet determined, right before I leaned over and kissed her shoulder, which I shouldn't have done, for any of several reasons, right after this, as we were just entering this as-yet-unnamed and as-yet-unrealized moment, she murmured, so close to my ear it could have been liquid — you can get dirty with me, and my mind exploded, a bit, in a good way but not an entirely good way, in part because, unbeknownst to me, I'd been longing to hear
promotion
"I have no idea why I didn't just say, what kind of dirty? or, better,
simply, show me."
just those words, in part because I had no idea what she meant, not really, though I had some ideas, some of which I couldn't articulate, or imagine articulating — some of which involved her mouth, some of which involved her ass, some of which involved my mouth, some of which involved daylight, some of which involved the holding of wrists, some of which involved the pretense of sleep, some of which involved icicles (an especially long one caught a bit of streetlight outside the window) — you can get dirty with me — for a long stretch of time after she uttered these words, while the outside world slept, or at least I imagined it sleeping, these were the last words spoken, or at least the last full sentence — more of a door than a sentence, a door into a room, a room that was hard to bring into focus once you entered, because it would take awhile for your eyes to adjust, either because of excess of light or because it was thick with shadows. Her words were an offering, but of what?
I have no idea why I didn't just say, what kind of dirty? or, better, simply, show me. And now, since I didn't ask, and even though I was there, touching and being touched for the next several hours, I'm unable to imagine what she'd answer, but maybe it's better this way, maybe she'd say something relatively unexotic (is that what I hope for, exotic?), like, ______________ , or, ______________ (you fill in the blanks — personally, almost any words uttered in that general spirit would have kept my attention, and, perhaps, yours). Once she uttered that word, one of us had to take the first step toward some greater unknown, and then hold tight, and ideally we'd both notice with some appropriate awe the strange transformations overtaking our bodies — heat moving and dissipating, rivers swelling their banks, a shortness of breath which soon became pure breath, a brief reprieve from stumbling through our lives, wondering what we were missing.
We were both, I should point out, involved with other people, so in many ways we shouldn't even have been there, or at least I shouldn't have — I shouldn't have told her my handful of stories, shouldn't have agreed to help her start a fire, shouldn't have taken her hand as we crossed that wet dark field which led to her room, shouldn't have leaned over to kiss her shoulder, shouldn't have inhaled her as she spoke. Oh, she told me her stories as well, but it's not for me to judge whether she should have or not. One
"One of the stories we told each other was the
things-weren't-going-well-at-home story."
of the stories we told each other was the things-weren't-going-well-at-home story, which for me was true, or at least seemed true, for one reason or another — a creeping dread of eternity that had been spreading like a stain for the past couple years, coupled with an hour-to-hour stumbling
— articulated to the end of what we knew, into that place of inarticulation, that shadow world, and after that night things most certainly didn't go any better, at least for me, but at that moment it seemed easier at some point just to show each other how hard it was, how desperate we were, how much we were willing to give up, even if we knew we might not move beyond that one dawn together.
There's so much you don't need to know, or that I can leave out — I trust you can fill in for yourself, from your own inarticulate storehouse. Let's just say I got it started, maybe to get us up to speed, though even as I write the words they seem unlikely — maybe everything I did from that moment forward was to stall for time, with the word "dirty" still rattling around my brainpan. Are you still with me? I hope so. I'm going to fail you here — I've tried writing out the choreography, tried breaking the night down into the technical — this leg pointing toward that wall, the heat from the fire leaving one side of our bodies cold, a footprint left on a door, a sentence ending with the phrase "all fours" — but the life drains out of it almost as soon as I write it. I'm sorry — if you were hoping for some Nabokovian "southbound mouth," I'm not up for it. But I do think it'll be more interesting to simply let you fill in the blanks: She took my _________ and ________ ed it. I _______ ed her ________ and it was _________; etc. I don't know what else to tell you, for the truth is that it's that one word that lingered longer than anything our bodies did or anything we did to the other's body. The body, after all, is finite, or seemingly so. It seems to have an edge, a border, which, if one goes far enough, will end. The tongue will lick air, the fingers will knead the pillow, there's really not much to say without falling back on archetype — the cock mirrors the tongue, the labia mirrors the mouth, for awhile there was a certain oblivion, an entering into the other in a purely physical way that pushed us to the edge of the metaphysical. Where she ended and I began, for many a long minute, I could not have said. I would like to imagine this is what she meant by dirty, and maybe it was, for when we were back in the city we would meet up, afternoons, and go to her apartment, but slowly everything unraveled, the lives we thought we'd been building crumbled, which perhaps they had to, and even now when I see her, which is rarely, I am a little stunned, though I can't say exactly why. By her beauty? That we were both willing, once, to push ourselves to the edge of what we could articulate? By our memory of entering into that room together? Dirty — she could whisper it in my ear today and still I wouldn't have a clue what to do, I would still be left without words. n°
Nick Flynn is the author of Another Bullshit Night in Suck City and winner of the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for The Art of the Memoir. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review and the New York Times Book Review.
